


Rift

by Simply_Isnt_On



Series: Torchwood Fic Week [3]
Category: Torchwood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-08
Updated: 2015-12-08
Packaged: 2018-05-05 16:42:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5382761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Simply_Isnt_On/pseuds/Simply_Isnt_On
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dying was easy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rift

Dying was too easy. Dying was continuing on, a day job where no one else came home. Dying was a flash of darkness, silence, something lurking- and then life.

Life is hard. Life is plodding along, watching your friends and family die, and die, and die, until seeing an infant makes your heart ache because _it’s just another death waiting to happen_ , and life hurts even more when you love people.

Every century or so, Jack Harkness (true name: unknown) gave up. When the last of his friends died, and he kept living, Jack stepped into a rift in time and space.

It wasn’t anything like dying. Dying didn’t even hurt anymore. But this, this hurt. The Cardiff Rift was too strong to allow a human to live, too uncertain to lead to anywhere in particular. And as the very fabric of the universe found the being of Captain Jack Harkness to be extremely distasteful, this always caused the Cardiff Rift to act up.

Jack knew this. And when the pain became too much, and dying was just another day on the job, only being torn apart by that very universe brought him any relief. Because despite the fact that for him, death was anything but chronic, his body didn’t know that. His body could still scream, scream, _scream_ at the pain of being divided into billions of atoms and flung to the wind.

For an unknown age, Jack was torn apart. Occasionally, he would start to heal, and a heart would pump once, somewhere in the blackness and color of time and space, and the universe would rip it apart again. The pieces it stole never returned, turned to energy whose magnetic pull held the universe together. And for an age, and an age again, and yet another, Jack screamed.

Eventually he landed back in Cardiff. He always did. Sometimes it was a heart, a leg, a kidney, tossed into a sewer, free of the Rift and of the tearing anger of the universe. Sometimes he came out wrong, the universe aware that it couldn’t destroy him, yet maiming him before letting him free. Sometimes his heart was missing, and he died, and died, and died again in a skip in Cardiff, gasping for breath as he waited for it to reform.

It always did, though. Even when he had lost himself in the rift, he always came back. Atoms reformed, multiplied, divided, added to his being until he lay there, shivering, alone and alive.

Sometimes, when he came out as a part instead of a whole, someone went to the police. Sometimes he was a murder victim after that, missing a heart, missing a body, only when they came to examine the evidence, the piece was gone.

Torchwood always welcomed him back. He had nowhere else to go, no one else to be. He was Captain Jack Harkness- the universe had torn his true name from him long ago, and now he was alone.


End file.
